Cancel the Flights So Nobody Misses Connections

   • Travel Tech Podcast   An AI asked to protect every passenger connection gave a flawless answer: cancel the flights. Kevin Hightower is Chief Innovation Officer at Cirium, where he leads Propulsion Labs, the company’s innovation group. He and host Alex Brooker, former colleagues at Cirium, discuss Kevin’s path from oceanic air traffic control at Lockheed Martin to Google’s drone delivery program, how AI is changing product development and decision making in aviation, Cirium’s aviation knowledge graph, and the data interoperability problems holding the industry back. What You’ll Learn Automating the routine: Lockheed’s oceanic ATC system let controllers comfortably manage 30 aircraft instead of a busy 7 to 15 by automating conformance checks and altitude probes. The three hour rule: No decision, from buying a car to buying a company, should need more than three hours of actual thought, with data gathering kept separate from thinking. Disposable prototypes: When AI cuts build time from months to days, the discipline shifts to throwing work away instead of defending ideas because of the effort already spent. AI as an accelerant for learning: Early career engineers who use AI to compress years of learning will outpace those who use it only to do an old job faster. Decisions, not dashboards: Most aviation decisions run roughly eight steps, and AI can now carry four or five of them before a human makes the call. The aviation knowledge graph: Aviation data starts with an aircraft and links orders, lessors, schedules, and tail swaps, so connecting it unlocks analysis no single dataset can. Efficiency before safety: AI will speed up flow management and sequencing well before it touches the safety critical systems that keep aircraft separated. The interoperability gap: Multi year, multi million dollar data lake programs rarely deliver usable value, and the real problem is combining data across boundaries while keeping control of it. Time-Stamped Highlights (0:00) Cold open: the AI that cancelled the flights (2:04) A Cessna ride to Embry-Riddle (4:48) "Do you want to kill people or save people?" Choosing air traffic control (6:26) Replacing paper strips over the Pacific (9:17) From Lockheed CTO to a quarter million drone deliveries (13:10) Why there's no one right way to be a product manager (16:22) The three hour decision rule (22:03) Formal testing in five minutes, not a few months (24:42) Fail fast, then fly everyone to Hawaii (32:39) Powering every decision connected to aviation (34:40) Behind the dip: analyzing every turn instead of one (47:17) Why nobody can predict the Charlotte arrival sequence (48:36) Could AI make travel worse for passengers? (54:09) Data interoperability and the $10 million data lake Guest bio Kevin Hightower is Chief Innovation Officer at Cirium, where he leads Propulsion Labs after previously serving as the company’s head of product. Before Cirium, he spent about four and a half years with Google’s drone delivery program, building the platform retail partners use to connect to the service, and held CTO roles in the US and UK at Lockheed Martin after starting as a systems engineer on oceanic air traffic control. He holds a BS in aviation computer science and an MS in software engineering from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. LinkedIn:   / hightowk   | Company: https://www.cirium.com About the Podcast The Travel Tech Podcast features long-form conversations with leaders across travel and technology. The show explores how software, data, operations, and distribution come together in real businesses, with an emphasis on tradeoffs, incentives, and lessons that transfer beyond any single company or role. Host bio Alex Brooker is an engineer, technology leader, and founder of Airside Labs, which applies aviation-grade testing and compliance rigor to enterprise AI systems in regulated environments. He previously built and scaled complex software in aviation and safety critical domains, and invests in early-stage technology ventures. LinkedIn:   / alex-brooker-2280002